Trentonian Editorial: Creepy crawlies

The addition of Paul Ryan to the GOP ticket prompted a gleeful Obama campaign and its media cheering section to kick over the Medicare rock. They may soon wish they hadn’t. Some creepy crawlies have been exposed to daylight.

Obama backers say Ryan’s an “extremist” who wants to “end Medicare as we know it.” This is supposed to make Granny and Gramp’s pacemakers misfire and reel in Geezerland Florida’s electoral votes for the incumbent.

The oldtimers are supposed to be freaked out that — gasp! — Ryan has dared to make some suggestions for rescuing Medicare from what it’s own trustees say is certain bankruptcy under the status quo. Now there’s what will really end Medicare as we know it, bankruptcy. If some of Ryan’s Medicare ideas are unsettling, how reassuring is the inexorable approach of bankruptcy?

Now that the Medicare rock has been overturned, out scurry the creepy crawlies including this icky number: $716 billion. That’s the sum ObamaCare siphons out of Medicare over 10 years to dress up ObamaCare’s bookkeeping. (That’s a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office figure.) Ryan himself has proposed $500 billion or so of Medicare “savings,” which you may translate as “cuts” if you insist. But at least his “savings” (or “cuts”) would be reinvested in Medicare to help keep it fiscally afloat. Not Obama’s $716 billion. Granny and Gramps can bid that sum adios.

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Another creepy crawlie that’s come scurrying out is an impending government reform to “improve” medical care. Medicare and Medicaid dollars soon will be snatched away from hospitals that readmit patients within one month of treatment at a rate greater than government bureaucrats believe desirable. Guess which patients tend to be readmitted within a month of treatment? Right, the elderly. And/or the poor. And/or patients of city hospitals. And/or African-Americans. At the top of the list of those targeted to have the most Medicare and Medicaid dollars snatched away from them, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Kaiser Health News: New Jersey’s hospitals. Some of the region’s — and nation’s — leading hospitals will have Medicare and Medicaid dollars snatched away by this “reform”: Hackensack University Medical Center, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University Hospital, Main Line Hospital of Bryn Mawr, Massachusetts General Hospital (recently ranked No. 1 by U.S. News) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital).

And — ick! — what’s THIS creepy crawlie? Why that would be an IPAB. Independent Payment Advisory Board. It will have sweeping powers under ObamaCare — virtually exempted from congressional and even judicial review — to decide which treatments get reimbursed and which ones don’t. It’s expected to do a green eyeshade number especially on expensive end-of-life care. It might be a bit far-fetched to dub it a “death panel” but perhaps not to say it’ll function as a rationing board. Yes, ObamaCare supposedly bans rationing. But IPAB gets to define the term.